Abstract
Semiconductors exhibit large optical nonlinearities near the band edge because of resonance enhancement. Optical bistability occurs when the optical nonlinearities are coupled with feedback. In bulk GaAs and GaAs-AlGaAs multiple-quantum-well superlattices, the nonlinearity arising from the presence of the free-exciton resonance has produced room-temperature optical bistability with a few milliwatts of power. The formation of biexcitons in CuCl, the saturation of the bound exciton on CdS, and band-filling effects in InSb, InAs, and HgCdTe lead to observation of bistability in these materials. A bistable étalon can be operated in an optical-gate mode to generate optical analogs of electronic gates such as AND, OR, and NOR. It has been demonstrated that a GaAs optical NOR gate responds in ˜1 pseC, using only;S3 pJ of energy. However, because of the carrier lifetime of a few nanoseconds, the repetition rate of the NOR gate is now limited to a few hundred megahertz.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1215-1227 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Journal of the Optical Society of America B: Optical Physics |
Volume | 2 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 1985 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics